Here’s an excerpt from the text of that speech followed by candidates’ responses to criticism, as well as where they stand on letting charter schools share buildings with district schools.

From Mr. Klein’s speech:

We spent so much time in the Bloomberg administration trying to get dysfunctional adult politics out of the way of student progress so that miracles like Harlem would be possible. It took pushing against entrenched, powerful and bureaucratic interests with much to lose from a change in the status quo.

The key ingredient to that work was courage. Geoffrey Canada had it, Mike Bloomberg had it, thousands of parents and students across the city had it. Courage to do what’s right. Courage to make a change that we all know is needed. And courage to tell political special interests, “no thanks, we’re putting the children first.” Read More »

New York City has been cleared to release performance reports for thousands of teachers after a state court on Tuesday declined to hear a final appeal from the city’s teachers union to keep the information private.

The reports, which rate teachers against their peers, were created in 2008 under former Chancellor Joel Klein as part of a push to evaluate educators using student test scores. They use a complex formula to try to isolate each individual teacher’s effect on their students’ performance, adjusting for factors such as poverty, class size and absenteeism.

About a dozen news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, requested copies of the reports from the city in 2010, but the United Federation of Teachers sued to block the release. The union argued it would be an invasion of teachers’ privacy. Read More »

Joel Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor who recently joined News Corp. to oversee its new education division, is eligible to receive at least $3.5 million annually in base salary and bonuses over five years, News Corp. disclosed in a securities filing Tuesday.

The employment agreement calls for Klein to receive a base salary of $2 million a year and an annual bonus with a target of “not less than $1.5 million,” according to the filing. Klein also received a $1 million cash signing bonus upon commencement of his employment, which began at the start of the year. (News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.)

Besides his education role, Klein also joined the board of directors and was named executive vice president in the office of the chairman. As part of his agreement, Klein is entitled to stock options, bonuses and other incentive plans “made generally available” to all other executives in the office of the chairman. He also receives a car allowance of $1,200 per month. Read More »

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the state should abolish a law requiring that all school chiefs in New York have at least three years’ experience in schools and hold a professional certificate in educational leadership. These background requirements can’t adequately assess whether a candidate is poised to lead the nation’s largest school system, he said Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg selected Cathie Black, a media executive with no education experience or credentials, to succeed Joel Klein as the city’s schools chancellor. The mayor is seeking a waiver for Black’s appointment from David Steiner, the state’s education commissioner.

A panel advising Steiner on the decision was slated to meet Tuesday to discuss Black’s qualifications and come up with a recommendation. The education commissioner is empowered to grant a waiver for “exceptionally qualified persons,” according to state law.

When asked Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal whether he thought this law should be abolished, Bloomberg replied, “Yes, I do…The skill sets that are needed to run something this big is not so simple to say there’s one test and you could come from only one background.” Read More »

A majority of New York City voters believe Cathie Black, the magazine executive tapped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to be the city’s next chancellor, lacks the right kind of experience to lead the nation’s largest school system, a poll released Tuesday revealed.

Nearly two-thirds of city voters believe the schools chancellor needs education experience more than management experience, the poll from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute showed. Black, currently chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, needs a waiver from the state education commissioner to become chancellor because she lacks both education credentials and experience.

An advisory panel to David Steiner, the state’s education commissioner, is scheduled to consider Black’s selection on Tuesday and could make its nonbinding recommendation by day’s end. Steiner has sole discretion over whether to grant the waiver.

The poll showed 47% of voters citywide disapprove of Bloomberg’s appointment of Black, with 29% supporting the selection and 25% saying they are undecided. Voters with children in public schools disapprove of the appointment by an even higher margin, 62% to 25%. And 63% of parents with children in the schools said Black does not have the right experience.

As voters gave largely negative reviews to Black’s selection, they also handed Bloomberg his lowest job-performance rating in five years. Read More »

Who needs an education background to lead the nation’s largest public school system? Not Cathie Black, a line that Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued to tout at a news conference Wednesday.

“This is a management job and this woman has proven herself in the real world with real experience,” Bloomberg said of Black, who is currently the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines. “She’s not just talking about it, she’s done it. And we are so lucky that’s somebody’s willing to come to our aid and take this job.”

Asked about the credentials of his hand-picked selection for the city’s next chancellor, Bloomberg emphasized that Black has “managed enormous budgets, she’s managed in a very difficult industry. This is a woman that has all of the credentials for this job.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the confidential search for New York City’s new schools chancellor, saying an open search would have been untenable. The mayor also said Friday that he keeps a list of potential candidates in his head for high-level jobs in his administration.

“We spent a lot of time looking around the world for the best people and we have a list of people in my mind,” he said. “Always trying to think if any of our commissioners or deputy mayors, you know, the way I phrase it, got hit by a truck — just as a euphemism — I know pretty much who I would make my first call to to see if we could get somebody to fill in right away.”

Bloomberg also dismissed critics who have called on the state education commissioner to deny a waiver to Cathie Black, the media executive he tapped to replace Chancellor Joel Klein on Tuesday. Black, currently the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, needs a waiver because state law requires the city’s chancellor have education credentials and experience in schools; Black has neither.

“It just goes to show they have no understanding of what the job is,” Bloomberg said of the critics calling for the waiver to be denied. The mayor said the school’s chief needs to be an expert manager.

Bloomberg’s announcement that he had selected Black to succeed Klein, who will be stepping down after more than eight years as head of the nation’s largest public school system, came as a surprise. The mayor did not publicly announce the opening — or advertise it — as he did when he appointed Klein in 2002.

“Nobody does a search in the open like that,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show Friday. “You can post certain jobs and people can apply. But at a certain level, that’s not just how anybody would do it.” Read More »

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein pointed out Wednesday, the performance of city students hasn’t taken a sudden turn for the worse. Aaron Pallas, an education and sociology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, reinforced that position in a Daily News op-ed:

It’s important to note that a student who was judged proficient last year and who didn’t meet the standard this year may not have lost ground, or done worse, over the past year. On average, students in New York City and across the state did about as well this year on the state reading and math tests as they did last year.

But Pallas also noted that the new standards “make clear that there are many more students than we had previously acknowledged who are not on track to be ready for life after high school.”

After calls from parents and teachers to push back the first day of school from Sept. 8 to Sept. 13, Chancellor Joel Klein sent a letter to parents and teachers Monday saying the start date will remain unchanged.

Ongoing talks between the Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers over changing the first day of school came to a halt Friday evening when the teacher’s union rejected a proposal by the Department to restructure the dates of professional development days.

“In order to move forward with this plan, we needed the agreement of the United Federation of Teachers. Unfortunately, the UFT refused our proposal…we are left with no choice but to keep the calendar unchanged,” Klein said in the letter.

Soon after taking over the country’s largest school system, Chancellor Joel Klein began to shutter large, failing high schools and replaced them with smaller schools. A new report released Wednesday shows how that effort has increased graduation rates for the mostly poor, minority students attending the new schools.

The 160-page report by MDRC, a nonprofit research firm, found that by the end of their first year in high school 58.5% of the students attending the new, smaller schools were on track to graduate in four years, as measured by credit accumulation and passed courses. That compared to 48.5% of students in larger high schools.

“It’s very exciting,” said Klein about the results. The report “confirms what we believed in,” he said. Klein’s administration has created more than 200 new secondary schools since 2002.

“Across the board, these are powerful results,” he said of the 20,000-student randomized study. Klein noted that the data compared students with the same demographic makeup, some of whom got into schools randomly through lotteries and some who entered lotteries but failed to win seats. Read More »